On Mar 22, 10:23 am, Chad Perrin <per... / apotheon.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 22, 2007 at 07:25:09PM +0900, Clifford Heath wrote:
> One doesn't lose data because of vendor lock-in. One loses (easy)
> access to data because of vendor lock-in (coupled with some form of
> vendor lock-out, of course -- data locked into a given format, user
> locked out of the software one uses to access it).
That raises a little bit of an existential question/argument:
If my data is changed to gibberish (random byte overwrites), it's
certainly lost. There is no way to recover it.
If my data is strongly encrypted and the original key is lost, is the
data lost? What if it could be recovered by 100 years of parallel
processing by all the computers on the planet brute forcing the key?
If my data is 'encrypted' by a vendor and I lose access to the
software needed to decrypt it, is it lost? It could be recovered if I
somehow force the vendor to give me access to the software, or I break
DMCA and reverse-engineer the format, or...
It appears that being lost is not a binary condition, but instead a
gradient whose value is inversely proportional to the ability to
recover/find the data.